


the names of all the hungry stars

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [61]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: (aka the jason todd of the al ghul family), Earth-3, Ethics, Family Drama, Family Feels, Gen, Good Parent Talia al Ghul, Immortality, Mirror Universe, Past Talia al Ghul/Bruce Wayne, Saving the World, Tim Drake is a Talon, Well - Freeform, al ghul family values, as is ra's, damian currently known as damianos al ghul, discussion of tim drake, ecology human rights and fighting supervillains, mention of nyssa raatko, parenting is hard though, she's genuinely trying, so flaws persist, what is free time, younger sibling problems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 03:25:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17317166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Timothy Drake was sixteen years old.Ra’s al Ghul had been trying to recruit him since he was eleven.“You should stop," said Talia, gazing over the absolute ruins of the base.





	the names of all the hungry stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [artificiallifecreator](https://archiveofourown.org/users/artificiallifecreator/gifts).



> This was for [Cerusee's fundraiser](https://www.gofundme.com/help-cerusee-recover) for the frankly appalling medical bills for her broken shoulder. (Still open! Though the commission event is closed.) I'm overdue with over half of those, because some much less serious health issues of my own came up, but I swear they're in progress.
> 
> schmoo92, aka artificiallifecreator, said: "As for the fic, I’m trying to think of a way to say ‘what wouldn’t be spoiler-y about the future of Baleful Star?’"
> 
> I mistook this query for the actual prompt, rather than the preliminary-question-for-framing-the-prompt it was intended as, and went off and wrote this instead of answering it. This has been deemed acceptable in spite of being entirely wrong. 
> 
> Schmoo gets a bonus crossover one-shot with actual Tim in it cleaned up and posted at some point as apology tho, so I guess look forward to that. ^^;

Timothy Drake was sixteen years old.

Ra’s al Ghul had been trying to recruit him since he was eleven.

“You should stop,” said Talia, as they gazed over the absolute ruins of the base.

It was a small one, a single sun-drenched building on the Greek coast, most of the space given over to above-board Leafshadow environmental work in the Caribbean, and only the secret chambers dug into the stone of the hillside connected to their more covert work.

The contents of which rooms had, on this particular day, been something very important.

Even without that, it was a personal insult to find this place defiled. Her mother had spent a lot of time here, fifty years ago. Talia turned from the ruins to her father to further press her point. “He’s never going to change.”

“No.” Dusan ibn al Ghul had both hands on his cane, and looked as if the steady breeze along the beach could whirl him away in one strong gust, and he squinted against the light, but his voice was firm. “Didn’t you notice? He still hasn’t killed anyone.”

Talia turned upon her brother so sharply the ends of her scarf flew out and caught the air, like pale green wings. “Pardon me, he certainly _has_ killed our people.”

“But not,” said Dusan in his papery voice, “when he could avoid it.”

“Because he’s _cultivating_ Father. I don’t understand how you two don’t see it.”

“Talia,” Ra’s reproved. It was gentle enough to be insulting—refusing to engage with her argument entirely, in favor of correcting her manner. Talia crossed her arms, realized it only enhanced the comparison to a sulking child, and dropped her hands to her sides instead. Kept them somehow out of fists.

“I can’t believe you’re falling for the same con _twice_.”

Dusan looked mildly shocked, but Ra’s only sighed. “If you live long enough, everything happens more than once. But this isn’t the same, Talia. Bruce came to us promising the world. Timothy has never offered anything.”

Talia flinched a little, even though she was the one who had brought up the Owlman and his history with their family, but she did not back down. As if not promising anything was a point in the boy’s favor. “ _Bruce_ has obviously primed him to play to your weaknesses. Why else would he have gotten away with all these gestures you credit him?”

“Perhaps he’s very clever.” Ra’s voice was dry, and still so untouchably _calm_.

Dusan at least looked mildly baited by her essentially calling their father an easily led fool, but the eldest of them might easily not have cared at all. Might have been thinking about something else entirely, as he humored his daughter.

“If he was all _that_ clever, and worth your efforts, he’d have found a way to come to us years ago.”

“Talia…”

But she could stand no more of that bland self-assurance. She turned her back on family and tumbled white stone alike. “Sometimes,” she bit out, “I understand why Nyssa is the way she is.”

She stormed away along the beach, feeling horribly young and also horrible, and leaving shocked silence behind her.

It had been a terrible thing to say. The reasons for Nyssa’s state of being were primarily two: Nazis, and the Lazarus Pit. She’d come out of the Pit better off, with more of herself intact, than anyone ever had but Ra’s, probably through the concentrating power of vengeance. But not so much so that green madness did not show in everything she did, even that which was right.

Nyssa Raatko née bint al Ghul, though, blamed their father for _everything_. For letting the Axis come to power. For letting her family die to them. Talia hadn’t been born yet at the time, but even if she had believed her father had ever had the power to prevent World Wars, she couldn’t think he had failed to do so out of _apathy_.

But at moments like this, she didn’t think Nyssa’s hate was all madness, either of Pit or of grief. The old man’s shadow stretched so black across the world, that sometimes…

Dusan caught Talia up some way along the coast, out of sight of the wreckage. There were a few sails and one modern powered boat visible against the horizon, and the distant sound of sheep could be heard if you listened through the surf, but otherwise there was no sign of human habitation at all, only sand and stone and sea. Talia was sitting on the sand with her back against a stone, cutting into the horizon with her eyes.

He came picking his way with his cane, carefully choosing his steps, squinting, and for a moment all Talia’s exasperation was forgotten in concern, and she felt nothing so much as ashamed to have dragged a hundred-and-two-year-old across such unsteady terrain as loose sand. Talia had been trying to spend more time with Dusan lately, conscious of his impending expiration date, but they were both so busy and found time for one another so rarely that she felt almost more terribly for blowing up at Ra’s and ruining this reunion than for the physical strain.

But she hadn’t _made_ him follow her. He looked up, and met her eyes. “Talia,” he said, just as if he was not-yet-seventy again, and she was still a little girl running away from her minders.

She was forty-three. She felt so tired. “Why won’t either of you hear me?” she asked.

“We do,” Dusan said, speaking for their father as he had so often when she was a child, and her brother was there when Ra’s couldn’t be. “We just don’t agree.”

No one had been killed today. Ubu, here to retrieve the package, had been hospitalized, but it was only a broken bone. None of that mattered, not really.

“He’s a threat. We can’t keep letting him…”

Dusan sighed. “Your friend Doctor Eisley does not make decisions for the League of Shadows.”

And there it was. “But we’re supposed to _value_ her _counsel_ ,” Talia retorted. “Do you think she _doesn’t_ know him better than us?”

“I think her biases should be taken into account.”

Pamela was biased, of course; that could not be denied. And yet.

“He took the Helm of Fate,” said Talia. They’d gone to such lengths to gain control of the artifact, after it erupted from a volcano six months ago. And now, for all that effort, Bruce had it in his keeping. “His master can’t be trusted with something like that.”

“At least he’s probably not stupid enough to put it on,” offered Dusan, and Talia rolled her eyes.

“My heart is comforted.”

Dusan rearranged his weight a little on his cane, shifting the strain of standing upright onto slightly different muscle groups. “When you reach a certain age…”

“Oh, don’t!” Talia broke in. “Don’t—resort to the Wise Old Man thing. You realize Father will _always_ be older than me, right? He’s always been there being older than you, isn’t that annoying, don’t—someone used to do it to you!” she realized, stabbing a finger in sudden recognition and leaping upright at once. “When you were younger! Someone fed up with Father used to use that same Wise Old Man act to win arguments with _you!_ And now you’re passing it down!”

“Wise Old Woman, actually.” Dusan’s smile carried a shade of melancholy. “It was Nyssa. She was insufferable.”

“Nyssa is only thirty years older than you!”

“And I’m only sixty years older than you.”

“Gah!” Talia marched in and stabbed a hand at him—not with much force, because she did not want to risk his fragile bones, but snake-quick. His cane came up in deflection, though, and for long, sea-sighing seconds they stood there on the sand, a score of Talia’s rapid strikes falling in vain.

Her reflexes were better than his, in addition to the strength she wasn’t bringing to bear, but Dusan the Ghost had been training young agents of the Shadows for some seven decades and more, and he had the benefit of being armed with a weapon whose weight and size he intimately knew, and a smile bloomed wider and wider across his pale face as her frustration spent itself against his guard.

Finally, her open hand slapped flat against the front of his shoulder, even as the butt of his cane tapped her knee, at an angle that could have driven the patella out of its place and crippled the leg if it had come with sufficient force.

“Draw!” declared Talia, and found herself laughing. “Come on,” she said, offering her brother her arm, feeling lighter than before even though nothing had changed. “We do have an investigation to complete.”

Dusan transferred his cane to his right hand, laid the left on her elbow, and let her help him back along the beach, to her mother’s broken house.

* * *

The investigation turned up nothing further of real use, and then they had to part ways, as Dusan took ship across the Mediterranean to the training complex he ran in Egypt, while Talia and Ra’s returned to what was at present their central base, in the hills north of Kabul—Ra’s had built it up considerably in the 1980s when he’d been spending what time he could in Afghanistan, trying to stabilize the region after the Saur Revolution predictably devolved into infighting and factionalism, and since security had returned to the western end of the Hindu Kush it had become an ideal compromise between remoteness and accessibility.

They took a commercial flight, as there was no tremendous hurry or need for security on this trip, and it was ecologically irresponsible to charter unnecessary flights. This also prevented any private conversation. A fellow passenger recognized Talia from last year’s magazine interview—Ra’s was trying to be photographed less often as his official age became steadily less plausible—and they were able to fill the hours to Kabul with ecology and politics.

One of Talia’s aides met them at the airport with a car, and so it was not until they were home and several immediate items of business taken care of that Ra’s was able to beckon her into a sitting room alone.

Talia pressed the doors shut, half regretting that she hadn’t seized some excuse to rush off while they were dealing with everything that had arisen in their absence. “I know what you’re going to say,” she said.

Ra’s sunk onto a low divan. It was an antique, made in Iran in the 1760s. Her father prized antiques, but had a tendency to use them like any other object. “Tell me, then.”

“You think I’m being cruel, and short-sighted, and reactionary, and you know best, as always.”

“…I intended to say none of that.”

“Well, then? What? Mind you Dusan already lectured me about giving Pamela too much _influence_.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Ra’s at once. Tipped one hand toward the lounge facing his. “Talia. Sit down?”

She did.

“This is not a question of whether I trust your judgement,” he said. “Talia. I thought we were past this.”

She had, too. She’d been Assistant Director of the Foundation for fifteen years, a position which seemed to take on more responsibility every year as Ra’s prepared to cede her full control of Leafshadow, and had begun taking on general duties as her father’s second well before that. The tortured uncertainty of her twenties, when she had been fighting so hard to believe in herself, her judgement and her place in the world after having built too many dreams around a true love who was false, was far behind her.

And yet the doubt, and the furious need to prove it baseless, still swept over her sometimes. Especially when her father didn’t believe in her. “Then why did you…” Treat me like an idiot child.

“I’m not ignoring you because I think you’re wrong,” Ra’s said. “It’s because…I can’t change what I’m doing, no matter how likely it is that you’re right. Not unless I could be completely sure.”

“Why?” Talia’s fists closed, pressed together over her knees. “Why is that little monster worth this?”

The old mystic sat still for a moment, sifting his words carefully, the way he had taught her to do as much by pointing out the consequences when he failed as by setting a good example. “You judge him by his crimes,” Ra’s said at last. “Which is a fair way to judge, though I think less so when he came to it as a child under the hand of an evil man. You look at him and think he is no different from Bruce Wayne.”

His eyes refocused on her face. “But understand, daughter, that he looks at me, and thinks the same.”

“Then he’s a _fool_ ,” Talia blurted, her expression little more than a mass of knots.

“Only if we both are, my dear,” said Ra’s, and sighed. “Probably less so, even still. A fair self-representation may have many motives besides truth, and yet I _chose_ to trust Bruce’s years ago, because I saw in him myself. I would rather trust where I can, than live a life ruled by fear and hate, but I cannot blame a child for seeing likenesses between us, and suspecting a hidden evil.”

“Even if he is less than a loyal minion, that just means he’s scheming for his own benefit. He just wants to use you, Father.” Talia ground her teeth. “He’s horrible, and bloodthirsty. He’s the heir to what Bruce is, not what he pretended to be. He’s not the opportunity to live that over again, to a better end. Nor a second chance at saving Jason Todd.”

Ra’s al Ghul sat silent for several breaths when she had done, long enough to tempt Talia to shift uncomfortably in her seat, but she was calmer now than she had been on the beach and held her posture. “You know me very well, daughter,” Ra’s said at last. “I can’t refute your accusations of my motives. And yet…”

Talia’s breath hissed a little as it left her. Of course there was _and yet._

“And yet the boy is also himself. He is clever, and he has nerve. He is caught in a trap partly of my making. He has chosen mercy, often, when the choice was his to make, and for that I…cannot give him up. I am the only one who still believes in him, Talia. I would rather risk giving that to someone who does not deserve it than deny it to one who needs it.”

“He’s hardly a child anymore. How much are you going to sacrifice, to keep holding open a door through which he refuses to walk?”

“What do you suggest I do differently?” Ra’s set the end of the cane he carried whether he needed it or not into the floor. “Should we kill him? Overpower him and hold him by force, until he submits and promises to forswear the Owl, and accept our protection?”

Talia grimaced. That would be far more foolish than anything her father had done. They could never hope to trust him after such coercion, would have to keep him locked up forever. “Why _not_ take him prisoner?” she challenged. “Even if we could never trust him to go free. One could say that by not stopping him by whatever means we _allow_ all his kills.”

Ra’s sighed. “Yes. But he is a weapon. Owlman would kill no fewer with his Talon taken, and if he did not rally everything at his disposal to break us until he took his right hand back, then he would only take another child to suffer the same fate.” His hands on the cane tightened only a little, but it was with the same tension Talia felt. “No,” he said softly. “We must break his power. That is the only way to be sure.”

They came closer every day. Secretly, quietly, never neglecting their other obligations both because they had no obligations that were not desperately important, and because their road forward was such a delicate thing.

It had always been difficult to strike a truly crippling blow on Owlman, because he had, in addition to his two personal power bases of gold and vassals, the bulwark of his alliances with beings such as the Kryptonian and the Mad Amazon.

To go onto an open war footing against him and survive, the first blow must also be the last—he had to be rendered useless to his co-conspirators, all his resources stripped from him at once, money and manpower and endless layered contingencies.

It might be years yet before they could move, and yet the expectation that they would was now in sight. Talia’s heart, which had loved what she believed the man to be once and could never quite scrape free the last of him no matter how she tried, beat more urgently in her chest with every breath, it seemed to her when she dwelt too much on it.

“It’s not fair to Damianos,” she said quietly. “You favoring this assassin over him.”

“…I love my grandson, dearheart, no less than I love you. He is thriving and free, and I may hold him in my arms and rejoice in him."

Ra's sat back a little on his divan. “Timothy is…a wild bird, or a bruised and muzzled dog, I cannot be sure which, but either way it wants coaxing and patience. That he requires more careful work is not a greater regard.” His expression was wry, and not quite a smile. “I don’t believe I even give the Talon more of my _time_ , little as I have of it to spare for anyone.”

“It’s not fair,” Talia repeated, not caring that it was no argument at all.

“I stopped giving Timothy usable information as bait years ago,” said Ra’s, and stood, seeming to really use his cane for once—he would visit the Pit again in a few years, or perhaps he wouldn’t. Perhaps he would wait until Dusan was gone, rather than taunt him in his fading days with the proof of his own immortality, hair washed dark and strength returned to its highest ebb. “If this concerns you so…find the mole.”

And he went.

“Very well,” Talia told the empty room. “I _shall_.”

But first things first.

She left the sitting-room, ignoring the curious eyes of League members wondering why they had needed a private conference so urgently when they were only just arrived, and climbed the stairs until she reached a high-ceilinged room whose wide windows had once been covered constantly with heavy steel shutters, but now let in the sun.

On one side it overlooked the central courtyard of the compound, and the sound of running water rose from the fountain there. In the center of the largest patch of sunlight, on a thick carpet, was the one she’d come here to see.

The fat marmalade cat that was his favorite was sprawled in a puddle just behind him, and possibly in deference to her slumber the sound effects of the logistically complex battle between his toy dragon and his action figure were muted. Talia lingered in the nursery doorway, enjoying the sight of him, safe and sound, with the sun in his hair.

But either his training or his instincts outmatched the silence of her approach, and he sensed the new pair of eyes on him after only a minute or so, and looked up. “Mother!” Cat and toys forgotten, he raced to her, artless and unguarded in a way that was already becoming more rare, and Talia swept him up into her arms.

With the warm weight of her son against her breast, nothing in the world seemed very terrible.

The surging dark outside could seem its worst when she held him, if she let it, as her fear for him clutched her heart, but she refused to let that impression linger. This was her time. This was all that was good. Just for now. Just let it be.

But Damianos was already wriggling free, too grown-up and excited to have the patience for extended hugging. “Look what I can do!” he said, pulling out his favorite wooden knife, artfully made to have a realistic balance. That trait was on full display as he flipped his toy up into the air so it spun once, twice, three times, as he reached up to intercept and instead of merely catching the knife spun it over the back of his hand, and then again over his knuckles, smooth as butter, before the hilt came to a solid halt in the palm of his hand, and his fingers closed around the grip, ready to slash.

“Well done,” Talia praised, because it had been. If the knife had been real, he would not have been cut, and there had been no moment at which he seemed he might lose control. “Is this what your tutors are focusing on now?”

Damianos snorted at her, shook his head. “Tt. _No_ , mother, they’ve followed the curriculum. I learned this from one of the guards.”

Talia’s mouth twitched, but she tried to look stern even though she entirely failed to sound it as she said, “Now, love, you know you’re not to distract them.”

He rolled his eyes. “In my _room_ , Mother?”

Talia gave in and ran her hand affectionately over his hair. “Well. Maybe occasionally in your room, if the windows are shut.”

“Anyway, look what I drew!” He flung himself onto the cushion in front of his low drawing table in the far corner, swept aside colored pencils and shuffled through a stack of bright papers that Talia leaned in to catch glimpses of, until he came to what he was looking for and held it out. “This one’s just for you.”

Talia took it, sensible of the honor of being thought of when she was not present. The white of the paper was almost entirely lost under rich pencils. The picture was roses, heavy blossoms dark pink and crimson red. Copied, she thought, from a photograph—Damianos’ skill was excellent for a seven-year-old, but visualizing the play of light and shadow shown here in this detail _and_ then rendering it into shades of color would be beyond him yet, and they had no such roses here.

“It’s beautiful, love.” Would it be overly doting, she wondered, to frame it. She could put it in her room, no one would see. She traced a vine at the farthest-away corner. She wondered if she should take Damianos to see Pamela’s new garden in Gujarat.

Did he like plants as much as animals? Would it be safe? The last time she’d seen Bruce he clearly hadn’t known she had his child, but the boy Talon could tell him at any time. “Where do they grow?”

“Ah—France, I think? They were pictured in the Geographic Digest.”

This answer lacked enthusiasm, so Talia only nodded. “Thank you,” she said. She couldn’t put the picture away without folding it, so she kept it in her hand. Knelt down on the strip of cushion left empty behind her son, because she was just old enough that given the choice between a padded surface and a hard one she would prefer the former almost uniformly. “Will you show me more?”

He brightened again, and reached for the stack he’d set aside. He was lonely. Talia remembered the feeling. She wished she knew how to fix it.

As a child, Talia had thought with some annoyance sometimes that if her father was _going_ to fit three wives into a hundred years he could at least have had more than one child with each. She had rather desperately wanted more siblings—she’d have had to share with them, of course, and it wasn’t that she’d lacked for playmates, less than Damianos did now since she’d had less strict security requirements. But the children of the League had always known who she was, and it had set her apart in the same way that sharing the blood of the Head would have brought her together with a brother or a sister near her own age.

And Ra’s had been so busy, and with her mother dead there had been only Dusan left to call family, besides him.

She understood, now, since having a child of her own, why there were so few of them. Of course for one thing their mothers had had better things to do with their time than spend it pregnant—Ra’s had a partiality toward exciting women—especially with childbed survival rates as they had once been, and the risk so high. But more…when you were so conscious of mortality as her father always was, it grew difficult to look upon a life so beloved.

Damianos was going to die.

Talia was going to die as well, long before her son did inshallah, but he was _going_ to die. Time would close over him like the drowning sea, and if he was fortunate and careful he would waste to bones as Dusan had. Talia herself was past forty. Before Damianos was an adult, she would be the age at which she first remembered her brother. Her son would have to watch her fade away and leave him.

And so would her father.

Always.

She knew it hurt him. She didn’t resent that, really—she understood too well. As she admired her child’s drawing of himself, much older, with a shining sword, which showed a reasonably good sense of anatomical proportion, and wished a little that he wouldn’t wish his precious time away.

She couldn’t resent the pain she caused Ra’s al Ghul just by existing, when eventually she would be gone.

But she could not help but suspect that her father’s years of persistent faith that there was something in Timothy Drake worth saving were rooted not in kindness, nor wisdom, nor even stupid guilt.

But only in the fact that, because of what the father of her child had made of him, whether he truly had chosen it or had it forced upon him…Timothy Drake, the Talon, if he were lucky, if he were careful…might never, ever die.

**Author's Note:**

> The only properly outlined mom Talia's ever been given afaik was a Greek woman named Melisande. I think it was in Son of the Demon which was immediately made non-canon? But it's still my default.
> 
> Afghanistan is in much better shape in this timeline btw because Ra's managed to convince Brezhnev not to do the stupid thing and invade (he knew it was stupid irl but a guy he liked was assassinated by a guy he didn't), so the civil war following the communist coup wasn't exacerbated into a Cold War proxy conflict. 
> 
> Also there was no US-Afghan War decades later, because even though I give DC's approach to historical events a freebie and let 9/11 still have been attempted under similar terms in spite of Afghanistan being much more together, the Wilson White House used its intelligence assets competently.
> 
> I have a lot of feelings about Afghanistan okay. And Ra's is kinda-canonically drawn to the Himalayas and Hindu Kush for his secret bases, inasmuch as DC bothers with real geography, so.


End file.
